blogging

That smart important take blasted out in a Twitter thread is going to quickly sink down though the chummy social media seas into the deep never to be seen again. Yes, some people might bookmark It. Others might bookmark the thread reader version. But this is no substitute for hauling those important thoughts out of the private social seas on to dry land of your own Blogging Island. Safe. Permanent. Secure. And most importantly — Linkable and Searchable.

The reality is, by the time the Labour leadership election roles round. The only content that people will immediately be able to find will be the takes in the mainstream press. And this is a major part of the problem.

Yes, the Chakrabortty take today in the Guardian is worth reading. But it isn’t the only piece/take in this moment that will be worth finding and re-sharing in 6 months.

It might unfortunately turn out to be the ONLY take that you can find that was useful reading produced in this moment. Written by someone and broadcast by an entity that already has a large platform. The mainstream media cannot continue to own the historical and indexible record.

It’s vital that more than ever we build out an independent media. The first step is to make your own media independent.

Somewhat ironic that this take is already “out-of-date” by the time my blog queue will get around to posting it but, like. That’s kinda exactly the point. It’s still findable, and relevant, and there. Because it’s on a blog, and forms part of the historical record of a particular moment. And just because that moment has passed doesn’t mean the thoughts and emotions it elicited are no longer worth reading, and remembering, and learning from.

The constant ephemera of social media takes is damaging; to our polity and our discourse, to our fandoms and our political systems.

So hey did you ever notice that the decline of blogging not only seemed to coincide with the rise of more “informal” social media… but also with the advent of large media outlets actually, like. Paying for blog posts?

Funny, that…

Relatedly: So about six months ago I met my friend’s girlfriend, who normally lives halfway across the world from both myself and Friend, for the first time. I only knew Friend’s Girlfriend by her first name, but she nonetheless looked extremely familiar. Eventually, I got enough courage to ask, “So, hey. Weird question, but… did you used to write for The Border House?”

For those of you who don’t remember, The Border House was basically the first website to examine videogames through an intersectional lens. Nowadays it seems almost forgotten, in part (though admittedly not whole) because its market—and its writers—got gobbled up by commercial publications like Kotaku, Polygon, and so on.

As it turned out, Friend’s Girlfriend was, indeed, the person I thought she was, and we had a nice little reminisce about the site. And how it ended. Small fucking world, turns out.

I’ve used WordPress technically since before it was WordPress, and I’ve used it as my main blogging system since about 2006.1 I like WordPress, and I still think it’s a better blogging solution than like 99% of its alternatives.2 That being said, I feel it is noticeably…. lagging, in recent years. I suppose radical change is difficult when you power like thirty percent of the internet, but WordPress’s lack of adoption of more recent blog technologies—anything and everything from inline comments to ActivityStream—make it feel kinda… old. And Gutenberg…

Ugh.

Maybe it’s just that I’m starting to want something different than what WordPress fundamentally is. The platform is still great for, say, powering my job’s largely-static corporate website, whose primary purpose is to be basically a glossy web brochure that can be readily updated by people with no webdev skill. And WordPress is still great for, say, the CSFG, which runs a combination ecommerce/forum website. But for my own website, i.e. this one, right here, that I basically use as a hub to all my other online presences, crossposting and interfacing as appropriate…?

I won’t lie: I’ve thought, more than once, about going back to something self-created.

Maybe. If there’s time…

Before that, I used a spaghetti-coded homebrew abortion I’d taught myself to program on in circa 2001. [↩]